Recently, Dr. Robert Moynihan, editor of Inside the Vatican magazine (a unique and informative publication regarding the various goings-on in the universal church), sent out an e-mail that contained the text of a lecture given by Pope Benedict XVI (then simply Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger) at Cambridge University in 1988.
The title of that 1988 lecture was “Consumer Materialism and Christian Hope” and I highly recommend it to anyone interested in learning more about the thought of our dear Pope. For the purpose of this blog entry, however, I just wanted to post a quote from the lecture that struck me as particularly relevant today.
Regarding the “moral imperative” (i.e., the natural law, or that principle inside all of us that compels us to act rightly, and which we so often ignore!), he stated:
… the moral imperative is not man’s imprisonment from which he must make his escape in order to finally be able to do as he wants. The moral imperative constitute’s man’s dignity and if he gets rid of it he does not become freer. Rather, he has stepped back into the world of mere devices, of things. If there is no longer an imperative to which he can and should respond in freedom, then actually there is no range for freedom anymore.… Morality is not man’s prison; it is rather the divine in him.
(Emphasis mine).
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